Discovering Astronomy

OLD PAGES: Archived at Feb 2020

(but unchanged for several years before that!)

New AL public pages at https://www.andyxlastro.me

Discovering Astronomy is a twenty credit pre-Honours course taught in first semester, open to any students. Here is the official University course information. All the course material is on the related Learn page, which is only available to UEd registered students. This page is just a repository for the components of the course taught by me.

Autumn 2013 version

This year I have not been involved in Discovering Astronomy.

Autumn 2012 version

For the 2012 version, the Course Organiser was Ken Rice. The material was taught by Ken, myself, and Arthur Trew.

Arthur's bit : Introduction
Observing the Heavens; Matter and Energy; Modern Physics; The stars

Ken's bit : Stars and Planets
The Solar System; The Outer Solar System; Exoplanets and star formation; Stellar evolution

My bit : Galaxies and Cosmology
For this version I wrote book-like notes, which are available below. (Introductory Notes )
Our own Galaxy - the Milky Way (The Milky Way)
A Universe of galaxies (The galaxy zoo); (The scale of the universe); (Peculiar galaxies)
The lives of galaxies (The dark universe); (The formation of structure); (The formation of galaxies)
The history of the Universe (The observers Big Bang); (The theorists Big Bang); (The distant future)

Autumn 2011 version

The 2011 version was pretty similar to the 2012 version, except my notes were PPT slides. The PDF version of these slides is available here as a single zip file.

2010 version

In previous years, Discovering Astronomy came in two flavours, Discovering Astronomy G and Discovering Astronomy S. (They were merged in 2011). The 2010 notes for my parts of for Discovering Astronomy G can be found here as a single zip file.